Universities shun universal verities

The fact that every human being, every day makes and shares his value judgements seems incongruous with positivist theories that purport to explain human actions yet can have nothing to say about those values.

Positivism has been adopted in every Australian university where the social sciences and humanities are taught. Even the legal profession must learn ‘judicial positivism’ as part of its jurisprudence course: ie., what the law says is just is just and there can be no basis other than personal feelings for criticising the law.

One of the men responsible for developing his theory of judicial positivism, Hans Kelsen, removed a footnote that, in the German edition of his work, would have endorsed Nazi Germany when his book was translated into English after World War II.

The effect of the judicial positivism, however, was easily recognizable in the reasoning of the recent decision of the Australian High Court regarding the ACT’s controversial homosexual marriage legislation. This decision, and its implicitly positivist doctrine, gives a clear indication that there is nothing right or wrong about marriage, it is merely a question of sufficient public agitation to create the necessary ideology.

But it is not only the legal profession that has been infected by positivism. Every department in every Australian university faculty whose object is the study of human beings and their endeavours has embraced positivism. [Strictly speaking, history departments have assumptions that provide similar results but their adopted methodology is called historicism.]

By way of example: Alfred Marshall, the father of the economic theory of perfect competition was a positivist as was Karl Marx the father of communism; John Stuart Mill introduced positivism to political science; Freud to psychology and Comte himself incorporated his theory into what has since become sociology and anthropology. Nor should Max Weber be overlooked for his contribution although his authority might be challenged on the basis of his part in designing the Weimar constitution.

The thousands of students who have studied in and graduated from the social science and humanities departments have been indoctrinated with the notion of the subjectivity of values; that is, that there is no right and wrong, no moral principles derivative from human nature which can be known objectively. I use the word ‘indoctrinated’ because no debate of the topic is possible within those departments where the scientific veracity of the academics is proven by their publications in like-minded journals.

As if to perpetuate the triumph of science over philosophy, university departments of education train teachers based on positivist theories of education and graduate them with the same ideas that can be then transferred to the schools.

Given that the science of education merely makes a student an efficient educator, it is little wonder that the curricula such academics work on contain such irrelevant content to what was once known as a liberal education.

This was no where more evident than in the Australian Curriculum - English generated on behalf of the last government by the Commonwealth’s Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, where English education became an expression of multiculturalism, it being the only absolute with which the academics were familiar.

One might be tempted to assume that because all universities have Philosophy Departments, the problem is being overstated. An examination of what is taught in those departments, however, shows that the thought of the great philosophers is taught as a history subject and not as if those thinkers have contributed any insight into the human condition.

Positivism as a method of science for understanding human existence is so internally inconsistent that it beggars belief that it could find its way into institutions whose employees purport to ascertain the truth in matters under their microscope. How can any man have confidence in a theory according to which there is no rational basis for determining which of the values of Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom are superior?